My team and I took a unique approach to our first story. We looked at self-defense classes offered in San Luis Obispo, in efforts to help spread awareness for Sexual Assault Awareness and Prevention Month. As a group we learned a lot about the importance of taking self-defense classes and we were provided with essential resources throughout our investigation process.
Our team began by researching incidents of sexual assault crimes in San Luis Obispo. We came across the article published by Mustang News in March of 2021, “Sexual Assault Crimes Soared In 2019. Some Say Cal Poly Police Aren’t Equipped To Respond.” The upward trajectory shows the urgent need for more resources and solutions implemented within the community. With this information in mind, we contacted two well-known organizations in San Luis Obispo: RISE & SAFER. We were informed that Cal Poly does not offer self-defense classes. However, outside organizations will partner with Safer to hold a self-defense class on campus as an event for an awareness month.
One of the first steps of the story process was contacting members within the community to see what they would like to know about this topic. The team member assigned this strategy and engagement role, Lauren Ladrech, says “It was nice reaching out to a variety of perspectives within the SLO community. I spoke with a Cal Poly professor, a Cal Poly student and a community member. They all had interesting angles and shared some great insight for what they would like to get out of the article.”
Sydney Ozawa was in charge of the interactive portion of this story. Ozawa, a fan of creating visuals, has been featured in a number of Mustang News pieces. Ozawa states, “Creating the graphic for this story was a fun and interesting process. I received courtesy photos from Model Mugging and used the ones that best complemented the story.”
We were fortunate enough to set up an interview with the director of Model Mugging, a business in San Luis Obispo that offers self-defense trainings. Our team writer, Katie Halstead, scheduled the meeting with director Mark Vinci. Halstead touches on her experience, “The written portion of this article was definitely more difficult to accomplish just based on the schedule of our sources. However, once I was able to interview everyone the story formed really easily.”
Daytona Clarke was a huge help throughout the video process. Clarke States, “Going through the video editing process for a story we’re doing remotely was definitely a challenge, but it’s about a really interesting topic that I think a lot of people will be interested to learn more about.”
Another great contribution to our story was input from Cal Poly professor Xiaoying Rong from Graphic Communications. Rong said, “I do think it is important to take self-defense classes… It is important figuring out how do we not mentally freak out because I know a lot of the time you freeze and don’t know what to do.” As a team, we learned a lot about this very important topic and we are looking forward to sharing our final product with Mustang News.